I finally saw “Borat” the other day, and there was something about it that bugged me about it for quite some time afterward. It took me a while to figure out what it was.
It made me wonder because throughout much of the film I simply wasn’t laughing. I winced a few times (particularly during the scene where the naked Borat is wrestling with his equally naked, staggeringly obese producer). I loved the sequence where a TV weatherman desperately tries not to break down laughing when Borat, after participating in an achingly embarrassing on-camera interview elsewhere in the studio, keeps wandering into the middle of the weather report while searching for an exit.
Most of the time I just watched it. Others around me were howling, but I felt disconnected from it, as if I was missing something. And I didn’t know what.
After giving it some thought, now I think I do. And it stems from the following realization:
Andy Kaufman did this first, and better.
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